The Man With Two Heads (1972)

Article 4345 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-23-2013
Directed by Andy Milligan
Featuring Denis DeMarne, Julia Stratton, Gay Feld
Country: USA
What it is: Jekyll and Hyde revisited

Dr. William Jekyll is experimenting with a formula that will remove the evil in man, but when he can’t get test animals, he loses his patience and tests on himself… with horrible results.

The most amazing thing about this movie is that the script is mostly coherent. Yes, I know that’s damning with faint praise, but I do mean it sincerely; of all of the movies I’ve seen by Andy Milligan to this point, this is the only one that actually seemed to have a story you could actually follow, and when you consider that his screenplay writing was one of the areas where he least impressed me, that marks a great stride forward. He even manages to incorporate some “Jack the Ripper” and “Marquis de Sade” themes into the Jekyll and Hyde story he recycles here; which in some ways seems obvious, but I’ve not seen it clearly articulated before. The acting is actually quite good throughout, but that doesn’t really surprise me; whatever his other weaknesses are, Milligan did show an ability to get decent actors. This movie even manages to do a better job than is his wont in terms of actually looking like a period piece. Granted, I still have little use for his “camera-out-of-control” action sequences or his attempts at montage, both of which tend to bring on headaches. And I noticed one other consistent problem with his work; the endings of his movies always feel rushed and confusing, as if he was getting bored and just wanted to finish it off. Nevertheless, this is probably the strongest movie I’ve seen so far from his oeuvre.

Asylum of Satan (1972)

Article 4344 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-22-2013
Directed by William Girdler
Featuring Charles Kissinger, Nick Jolley, Carlo Borelli
Country: USA
What it is: Devil worship, mad doctor style

A female singer finds herself inexplicably transferred to an asylum under the care of a man called Dr. Specter, and his designs on the patient are hardly honorable…

This was the first movie directed by William Girdler. Though nothing of what I’ve seen of his work so far has impressed me, I will say this much; he got better. The most interesting thing about this movie is that it combines the “mad doctor” and “devil worship” movies, and that’s only slightly interesting. The movie is pretty bad on every level. The acting is terrible all around, though the actress playing the heroine is the worst; when she tries to emote, it looks like her primary concern is to make sure she doesn’t smear her make-up. The movie often seems edited at random, and the direction is static and lifeless. It has a plot revelation about two people being the same person that is mostly notable for its total pointlessness. Some of the sets look like they only had one can of paint to use for each one. And you’d think that someone making a virgin sacrifice to Satan would at least have made doubly sure that he had a virgin in the first place. Really, I feel like I’m shooting fish in a barrel here, and it’s the bottom of the barrel as well.

Piranha (1978)

PIRANHA (1978)
Article 4343 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-21-2013
Directed by Joe Dante
Featuring Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy
Country: USA
What it is: JAWS-inspired thriller

A strain of genetically mutated piranha are accidentally released from an abandoned army site into a nearby river. Is there any way to stop them before they reach the ocean?

According to IMDB, Universal originally intended to sue New Line for this movie because of its similarities to JAWS; however, Spielberg saw an advance copy of this movie and loved it, so the suit was dropped. I’m not sure whether the suit would have stuck; though the movie does have some similarities (an underwater terror and an attempt by authorities to downplay the threat), it’s far from a slavish imitation of its source. This is the first movie I’ve covered from the oeuvre of Joe Dante, a director whose work I generally enjoy; his love of using actors from older genre movies and his references to those earlier films add a lot of fun to the proceedings. On top of the actors listed above, the movie also features Dick Miller, Barbara Steele, Keenan Wynn, Paul Bartel and Richard Deacon. It also features the screenwriting debut of John Sayles. Overall, the movie is fairly uneven, and there are moments where the editing could be better, but there are a number of individual moments I really like; in particular, the scene inside the laboratory (which also features a little bit of stop-motion animation with a miniature monster running around) is very entertaining. One thing it certainly does is to up the fantastic content a bit; by making the piranha genetic mutations, there’s some science fiction added to the plot as well. I look forward to covering more of Dante’s films in the future.

The People that Time Forgot (1977)

Article 4342 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-20-2013
Directed by Kevin Connor
Featuring Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas
Country: UK
What it is: Burroughsian sequel

A group of adventures arrive in the prehistoric land of Caprona to see if they can locate the hero of the previous movie.

Will they find him? Well, given that Doug McClure’s name is in the credits (though not as the lead) pretty much answers that question. You know, you really can’t blame them for making a sequel to THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT; after all, Edgar Rice Burroughs did as well, and this is based on that sequel. I really should read those books; I’m rather curious as to how closely this movie follows the book. It has the same fun-but-not-quite-convincing dinosaur action, various primitive tribes of people, and ample proof that they had hairdressers and Frederick’s of Hollywood in primitive lands. Now I know in an adventure movie of this sort, one is supposed to concentrate on the episodic action rather than dwell on the the whole story arc. However, when I do the latter, I can’t help but dwell on the fact that the ultimate purpose of this movie is to put in place the commonest “lost world” cliche of them all, a cliche that the previous movie overlooked (if it hadn’t, there would have been no sequel). The minute they mention the volcano, I should have seen it coming. Still, I did learn one thing here – there are no volcanoes in Nebraska. All in all, this is one is silly but passable, though not as much fun as the original.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Article 4341 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-19-2013
Directed by Wes Craven
Featuring John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp
Country: USA
What it is: Dreamworld serial killer

Several teenagers begin having nightmares about a stripe-shirted razor-fingered mutilated man trying to kill them. When one of them ends up dying horribly, it becomes apparent that the death at the hands of the killer means death in real life.

It looks like I’m having a bit of a run of child-murderer movies here. Actually, I’ve long been curious about this one. The basic concept is brilliant; having a killer that can stalk his victims in their dreams really opens the door to all sorts of possibilities in terms of spooky, non-realistic imagery. It also means that during the dream sequences, normal standards of logic and smart behavior are not relevant; when confronting a killer in a dream, there may be no such thing as a good choice. Still, a certain degree of internal logic makes for a more intriguing story, and when the script starts addressing the issue of how the dream world interfaces with the real world, opening up the possibilities that Freddy Krueger is indeed a defeatable entity, it’s a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the script as a whole isn’t quite up to the concept or its best moments; clumsy moments abound, and the script ultimately turns its back on its own internal logic. As a result, I can understand why the concept was interesting enough to lead to a whole slew of sequels, but I can also see why the series would get quite tiresome after a bit. The movie also features the movie acting debut of Johnny Depp, and Robert Englund would actually achieve a certain level of horror movie stardom as Freddy Krueger. All in all, it’s a good horror movie; a better script might have made it a real classic.

Si muero antes de despertar (1952)

aka The Lurking Vampire, El vampiro acecha
Article 4340 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-18-2013
Directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen
Featuring Nestor Zavarce, Blanca del Prado, Floren Delbene
Country: Argentina
What it is: Thriller

A child believes he has a clue to the identity of a man who killed one of his classmates, but he is either unable to tell or unable to convince the authorities. Can he prevent another child from being the next victim?

This movie entered my list under the title THE LURKING VAMPIRE, and for several years, I was unable to match it to any title on IMDB; searches on the given alternate title and on some of the cast members also proved fruitless. It’s only recently that IMDB matched the alternate title (EL VAMPIRO ACECHA) to the correct movie, and I realized that part of the problem was that my other sources claimed that certain actors listed (specifically, German Robles and Abel Salazar) were not, in fact, in the cast. The above plot description is a bit of a guess, as my copy of the movie is in Spanish without subtitles, but I did know a few facts to help me along; I knew the story involved a child murderer and a boy had to battle him. The Walt Lee guide says there are a few touches that make the killer potentially supernatural, and some of the scenes look spooky enough to back that up. I really wish I could have followed this one better; it looks like a tense little thriller, and there’s a memorable nightmare sequence in the middle of the movie. It’s apparently based on a story by Cornell Woolrich. This is one I really hope shows up for me someday with English subtitles and a good print.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

aka Day of the Woman
Article 4339 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-17-2013
Directed by Meir Zarchi
Featuring Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace
Country: USA
What it is: Revenge thriller

A woman writer goes to a cabin in the woods in a small town to finish her novel. When she is attacked and raped by four of the residents, she decides to exact a bloody revenge.

If I weren’t committed to be as comprehensive as possible for my movie-watching project, there are a few movies I would skip. This is one of them; I’d heard about it for years, and I never had the slightest desire to see it. To me, it sounded like the ultimate in pandering revenge dramas, a movie where the first half consists of a group of people doing horrible things to someone for the sole purpose of making you want to see horrible acts of vengeance performed on them in the second half. Having watched it now, I can say that I’m right; that’s pretty much what the movie is all about. If there was anything that surprised me about the movie, it was that it was as competently directed and produced as it was. Oddly enough, that may have made the manipulation of the first half less effective; had the movie been cheaper and more amateurish, the violence might have had the effect of seeming grittier and more real. The same effect might have been accomplished had the direction and editing been sharper and more intense. As it is, the movie’s worst problem is that the rape sequence is just interminable, encompassing as it does three separate attacks; it runs almost thirty minutes, and after a while you start to resent the filmmakers for trying to stretch it out as long as they could. Still, despite the fact that I would love to reject the movie completely, it’s not totally worthless; in some ways, it gives insight into the nature of “rape culture”, a subject that has been in the news lately. Still, those observations could have been made in a much less exploitative movie, so I really can’t bring myself to recommend this one to anybody.